A system and method are described for extracting information from text, which can be done without prior knowledge that the text includes a list. The method applies analysis rules (S102) to a sentence extending on lines of text (S104) to identify a set of candidate list items in the sentence (S108). Each candidate list item is assigned a set of features including one or more non-linguistic features and a language feature (S108). The linguistic feature defines a syntactic function of an item of the candidate list item that is likely to be in dependency relationship with an item of a candidate list presenter identified in the same sentence (S108). When two or more candidate list items are found with compatible feature sets (S114, S120), a list is generated (S118) that binds them as list items of a common list presenter. Dependency relationships are retrieved between the list presenter and the list items (S122) and information based on the extracted dependency relationships is outputted (S124).
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